North

by Frank Owen

  The hungry sisters knew not to follow. The hands grabbed hold of one another, soothing and stroking. If Dyce had been closer, he would have heard the whispering of wet flesh sliding over flesh.

  But he was alone. He stood panting, and the curse of his night vision showed him all the old terrors. Would it never be over? The bodies lay quiet, as he remembered them, in all their states of decay. From each face – wrinkled, or freckled, or dimpled, their differences come to nothing – grew the mushrooms, fat and ripe. Clumps sprouted from lipless mouths and ruptured noses. Fungi grew in bony eye sockets, neat and white as the eyeballs they replaced; in clean-picked ribcages they had made their own gardens, spotted and reddish as kidneys, domed and blue as bruises, hung all around in strings and fronds like fairy lights.

  Dyce found that he was crying, as if his body was testing each function to see if it still worked. In his terrible dream he could not stop himself from reaching out to pick the mushrooms, as many as he could gather, from the wrecked faces and the nests of the ruptured, ragged lungs – just as he’d done before. Each time was the same. Even in the dream he knew he was not awake, and even in the dream he suffered and wept and told the dead that he was sorry.

  But he had been wrong to think that the bodies were lying quietly. With each mushroom he picked, the robbed corpses groaned. As he reached to harvest that hard-earned fruit, the fingers of the dead stirred to protect their precious trophies. The bones squeaked and flaked and feebly roused themselves to swat his human hands away, but now it was he who was relentless: old and young, newly dead and long gone – Dyce took a mushroom from every single body.

  It could have been me lying there, he told himself. Work faster! Make those lives worth something. Don’t let it all have been for nothing!

  In his dream he coughed again, and this time he felt something hard in his throat, a nub rising in his gullet. It slithered over his tongue and then bloomed from his open mouth. He reached up to feel its soft horror. He ran his fingers under the skirting gills of it and then, with a tug, he pulled the mushroom-tongue out of his mouth. The pain ripped through him and he woke.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the roof of the pickup, but he couldn’t move. His head lay rigid on Vida’s lap; her hand was cupping his cheek. The shudder worked through him.

  ‘Looks like you won’t need to wake him,’ said Buddy. ‘He always have nightmares this bad?’

  Vida shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  The car slowed and then turned off the road, making for the steel hull of some giant wrecked machine resting in the waterlogged prairie. A tractor? Vida squinted into the filtered gray morning. Too small. This was huge.

  The pickup rocked and trundled across the soggy grass, and as they got closer she saw the wreck for what it was: the fuselage of a downed jet, one of the relics from the War. Across the outside, someone had painted a word, but they weren’t close enough for her to read it. She tapped Buddy on the shoulder.

  ‘That what it looks like?’

  ‘If it looks like your home for the next few hours, then yes. We’re sleeping inside that baby tonight,’ said Buddy.

  ‘What does it say there? In white?’

  ‘REMEMBER.’

  She snorted.

  ‘I know. But it’s big enough to hide my truck round back. And I stashed some supplies inside a couple of months ago. Thought, better safe than sorry, and it seems I was right. It’s pretty comfortable, actually. Dry. And bigger than it looks from the outside.’

  ‘I’ve had worse,’ said Vida, and Buddy thought as he glanced back at her that it was the first time he had seen her smile.

  10

  Kurt Callahan kicked at a rock as he walked back along the river toward Saratoga.

  ‘Send the old man down the river with the keys in his pocket. Just great. Fucking genius.’

  He balled his fist and punched himself in the leg so hard that he stumbled, then hobbled on. The pickup had turned out to be useless. After he’d killed the old couple, he’d scrambled up the slope, all the while trying to figure out whether he knew how to drive. Stick-shift would be tricky, but he was sure he could figure out automatic. He’d never seen an actual working car, but he’d played plenty in the rusted wrecks of them, tugging on the steering and honking the horn until his uncle Gus had come out and shown him how to drive: a way for the old guy to relive the past. Kurt had soaked in the details – how to use the pedals, the flickers, the mirrors, the gauges – while sifting the instructions for utility. He couldn’t help himself: anyone who’d grown up the way he had – strong mind, weak kin – would be the same.

  ‘Now see here. Some kids have smashed in the glass. No sense in that. But you can see where the needle was. Used to point at the numbers.’

  Kurt hadn’t told his uncle that it was him who’d bashed out all the glass – every bit of it, meticulous and deliberate. Some of the tiny dials he’d had to hammer at with small stones before they had cracked.

  But none of the long-ago lessons mattered without the keys. Kurt had searched the cab for a spare set and then resigned himself to stealing what he could.

  ‘Reduce, re-use, recycle,’ he said to himself. ‘My civic duty.’

  In the glovebox was a state map, a rusted multi-tool and a roll of toilet paper bent out of true. Kurt fingered Bethie’s swan pendant at his neck as he tried to orient himself. Looked like the small town he’d been swept past was Saratoga, and that it was the closest town by half. He slammed his hand against the steering wheel in frustration. There had been a bridge there too, that he’d tried to hang onto, but the water had smashed his legs against the supports and wrenched him onward. Those muscles would ache now with each step he took on the long walk to civilization.

  ‘Serves you right for letting those keys go,’ he told himself. The multi-tool was small consolation.

  It was late afternoon when the little town came into view. A diner was perched on the outskirts, right beside the highway, like a hitchhiker leaning into traffic. It made business sense, Kurt figured, risk and reward, but on a busy day it must have been chaos.

  He rounded the building, looking for the front door. At the front of the diner he saw a fat woman closing the place up. As he watched, she picked up a tabby cat and settled it under one arm; she fought a set of keys with the other. He took a moment just to look. People were tall in the South, even with all the sickness, but they weren’t chubby, and hadn’t been in his lifetime. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone as well fed as this woman. He wanted to poke a finger through her floral blouse and into her stomach just to see if it sank in, if the flesh would stay dimpled, like Play-Doh.

  Now she had turned back to the counter. He moved fast, his legs complaining, and pressed his nose against the glass of the door, cupping his hand around his face.

  ‘Any food in there?’ he called.

  The woman shrieked and dropped her keys. She clutched the cat to her enormous bosom like a shield, and it squirmed silently. She frowned at Kurt through the glass, then relaxed a little when she saw he was white, boy-sized, even if he was still damp in places and a little cut up. He could feel the river water sticky on his skin, a film of filth.

  Norma came slowly to the door and opened it a crack. ‘This ain’t the Salvation Army, kid. I’m just on my way out too.’ The cat winked lazily at Kurt. He stared back. She sighed and shifted the tabby so that it sat more comfortably. ‘All right, sunshine. Don’t give me those boo-boo eyes. I get enough of that from Linus here.’ She held the door wider, and he caught a reek of cheap perfume. ‘That’s a pretty pendant. Your girlfriend give it to you? Where you from, anyway?’

  ‘Down South.’ Kurt looked around inside. There were half-eaten donuts on one table, some cups with the dregs in them like river mud; Norma hadn’t got around to clearing.

  She snorted. ‘You also got swept up by the river?’

  ‘What do you mean “also”?’

  ‘You’re not the first to try that line on me today, sonny. It wasn�
�t hell of a funny the first time, neither.’

  Kurt let his shoulders drop a little. Softly, softly.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Who else what?’

  ‘Who else was from the South?’

  Norma clucked her tongue and thought of the old man in the passenger seat of the De Luxe, working her husband’s reindeer sweater over his head. It had taken a minute for her to get over the sight of him – thinking it was her dead husband not only back from the grave, but still eager to escape little Saratoga, just as he always had been.

  ‘Old guy. Had a gimpy leg. Looked like he’d been rode hard and put away wet.’

  ‘He have a name?’

  ‘Not that I got.’

  ‘He happen to say where he was headed?’

  ‘Mentioned New York and Des Moines. Can’t say what his plans were, though. We didn’t exactly swap diaries and braid each other’s hair.’

  ‘Which one’s closer?’ Kurt asked.

  ‘Which one? You mean New York or Des Moines?’

  Kurt nodded. Norma pursed her lips and stared hard at him, all humor vanished. Shit.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  Kurt shrugged.

  ‘Des Moines,’ she said slowly. Her eyes narrowed even further. ‘And now I really do have to get going. Enough mopping up for one day, and this mess ain’t going anywhere, now, is it? You want some donuts? That’s the best I can do.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kurt, and watched her bend to pick up the keys with a groan, the tires of fat squeezing across her back. As she straightened up with glacial slowness, he slipped the old multi-tool from his pocket. He flipped out a long one – an emery board, streaked with rust – and stabbed her in her vast neck, aiming between two moist, rubbery folds of flesh. He felt the tool bend as it met vertebrae. Her skeleton was the same size as everyone else’s.

  Still, she fell over, top-heavy, her tiny feet unable to support the change of weight. The cat was caught under the woman’s arm, wedged against her boobs. It began yowling and clawing and biting to free itself, and it was only then that Norma understood that she was dying, and she screamed too. Kurt stabbed her again, and then once more, for luck. Then he stood back, panting, and saw the tabby work itself loose and dash for the doorway, but he was quick to slam it closed.

  ‘You don’t mind if Linus tags along with me, do you?’ he asked Norma, but she was past hearing him, the bloody froth already settling on her lips.

  That night Kurt slept curled up in one of the booths, holding tight onto Linus, his clothes drying over the grill and his stomach stretched tight with stale donuts and coffee, while Norma’s blood pooled on the lino, undoing her long day’s work.

  11

  Felix would have to struggle into the trousers. The back of the car was spacious, but the passenger seat had been pulled all the way forward and had rusted in place; it was too intimate for him to slip each pants leg on gracefully. And he didn’t like the idea of climbing naked into the back seat, past Adams. Wasn’t there that old story – about the fool who tried to put both legs into his pants at once?

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘This ain’t gonna be pretty.’

  Adams snorted. ‘Sure. I’m driving over here, just so’s you know. Watch that bottle on the floor, there. Guard it with your life.’

  Felix laid the cuffs over his feet, then unrolled the wadded pants up to his knees. Next he wedged a knee against the dash, lifted his saggy buttocks off the vinyl and pulled the trousers up. Finally. He lay back, panting. He felt like he’d been doing nothing these past few hours but staring at the scrubby gray bush where his penis shrank like a snail.

  ‘Next time you buy me dinner first,’ he said. Adams smiled and said nothing. Every now and again he would finger the plaster on his face.

  Felix held his hands still in his lap and tried to get his breath back. Jesus, but the sweater stank of mothballs, though that was a relief compared to the vanilla basketball. He couldn’t breathe with that thing in his face. He reached up and yanked it off the mirror and tossed it to the back of the car – then immediately regretted not throwing it out the window. Shaking it seemed to have stirred something in it and the smell circulated around the car in waves. Adams didn’t seem to mind, so Felix left it. First stop, he’d ditch that fucking thing. He cracked his window further and stared out at the new world: the North.

  It still looked rich, even with the storm damage. There had been more to ruin in the first place. There was a row of office blocks at the edge of town, each window boarded over against the storm, and it set Felix to thinking about work. A job! The luxury of it. He had spent the last decade working harder than he ever had before, but it wasn’t the kind of life where one man only made signs and another just fixed watches. And you know what? He didn’t miss it. Okay. Maybe the TV shop back in New York. But he was younger then, and what he really missed was the idea that you had options. Since then he had made a bunch of KEEP OUT signs and fixed barometers and harvested honey and measured the weather and repaired a gun and drawn maps and plumbed his shack. That was what folk were meant for – the learning and the figuring out. That was what kept you young. The mistakes made you more glad when you didn’t fuck up, because you knew how bad it could be.

  As they left the city limits now, there were houses on hills flanked by carports, and road signs with clean edges – and not a bullet hole anywhere among them. Somehow there were fences too, as the houses became sparser and the land gave itself over to farming. The wire ran in neat lines, edge to edge, around new-planted crops, the furrows washed flat, the seeds gone down to the sea.

  But this didn’t happen by itself. Somewhere Renard’s people were watching, guards set along the way at likely entry points, paranoid state protectors.

  Enough wondering. Time for some answers. ‘You ready to talk?’ asked Felix. ‘’Cause I got a million and one questions for you, buddy.’

  Adams nodded. ‘We’ll go one, one.’

  ‘We’ll do what?’

  ‘You ask a question, then I ask a question.’

  ‘As long as it ain’t English lit or calculus. How about we start with this one: who the hell are you?’

  Adams adjusted his spine, settling against the seat. ‘I’m part of an organization.’

  ‘Christ. Freemasons really are everywhere.’

  Adams side-eyed him. ‘Better watch that language, friend. Ever heard of the Resistance?’

  He didn’t wait for a response. Of course Felix hadn’t. No one had heard of the Resistance, even North-side of the Wall. Or if they had, it was in the way of a rumor or a myth: here and there an earnest man went missing in the night, or a deranged daughter was sent to a state asylum. And why should it have been otherwise? Renard was still the man – and America was the giant fuck-up it was always going to be.

  ‘Anyway, since the War ended and the Wall went up, there’ve been people this side that think Renard’s regime was basically a military coup. A lot of us lost a parent or a grandparent or a sibling, you know. A missing generation. Sometimes two. My daddy went back South for the polling before the fighting started, and – poof! – it was like he dropped right out of sight. No phone calls, no word – from him or of him. Nothing. The War never made sense. And it’s not just me. There’s a few of us who never bought into the government Kool-Aid. We know when we’re being lied to.’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Felix. He reached forward and adjusted the heater, turning a vent toward him. The air came out dry and hot and he rubbed his hands in it. ‘That’s better. But what’s any of that got to do with my scrawny ass?’

  ‘One, one, remember? My turn. What’s it like in the South?’

  Felix laughed. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  ‘You know nothing about your own country?’

  ‘I’ve never been there myself. And you’re the first person I ever met who’s made it across the Wall.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘So? I’d like to know.’

&nb
sp; Felix sighed. ‘How do I know you’re not one of them Secret Service guys? Maybe all this’ – he waved his woolly green arm around the car – ‘is a trap.’

  Adams shook his ruined head. ‘I just saved you from whatever those two army guys wanted to do to you, and this is how you pay me back?’

  Felix regarded him steadily. Adams traded him a hard glance in return, then slammed a hand on the wheel. ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Just keep your eyes on the road.’

  ‘Deal. Now start talking.’

  ‘Where to begin? The South is dead. Wasteland. Fucked.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, that Wall back there’ – Felix thumbed over his shoulder – ‘divides this continent into the living and the dead. You know about the wind, right?’

  ‘Some – but pretend I don’t.’

  Felix nodded, then continued, ‘The wind blows a new disease over those states most every day – and if you’re dumb enough or unlucky enough to get caught out in it, you’re fucked. I’ve seen some crazy shit – skin peeling off, eyes going blind, guts falling out. People losing their minds too. Just from breathing the air! Sounds plain weird when you say it out loud, don’t it? Never had to explain it to someone before.’ He tried to gauge the reaction: he stared at Adams’s lumpy skin, his bloodshot eyes, the hair in clumps. Adams was undeterred.

  ‘I know. It looks worse than it is, believe me. But let’s talk about you. You’ve seen a bit of that action yourself, old man. That about the sum of it?’

  Felix shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some.’

  ‘Losing is not an option up here, my friend. Official word from Renard’s propaganda people is that the plagues are coming in on the wind from the big, bad, dirty South – and they’re getting a bit of help on their way. Know what I mean?’

  Felix said nothing, the dormant rage he thought he had damped down flickering in his chest. Incredible! Renard was painting the defeated wasteland of the South as the enemy, strong enough to be afraid of, and strong enough to bring to heel.